Title: Alien
Author: Alan Dean Foster
Type: Fiction
Page Count/Review Word Count: 246
Rating: 4.25*/5
For some reason, I wasn’t expecting this book to be as good as it was. I’m not sure why, because I’ve seen and enjoyed the movie and I’ve read and enjoyed Alan Dean Foster. I think another part of the reason is the book itself, which is one of those old sci-fi paperbacks with tiny print and super yellowed pages. And then for the first ten pages or so, there was a lot of computer jargon that felt super dated and just kind of annoying, with people saying stuff like “patch the RDN drive through the CRX aux” for pages at a time.
But once I started to get absorbed into it, I found myself unironically enjoying it, and despite the fact that it’s a novelisation of the movie, I think I liked the book better. That’s a testament to Alan Dean Foster’s skills as a writer, and I was particularly impressed by how visceral it was. In the chest bursting scene, for example, Foster was writing about the stench of Kane’s perforated bowel, a detail that you wouldn’t pick up on if you just watched the movie and wrote what you saw.
All in all, this would be a great book to read if you’re into sci fi in general, as well as if you specifically like Alien. It definitely did the movie justice, hurray.
Alan Dean Foster
